💃 TREE 328: The opposite of Learning is boredom. Or is it?

This week author, teacher and master learner Alison Acheson is writing about continuing to learn throughout life. She’s choosing the music too. I’m doing the illustrations and notes at the end. —Jeff

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One.

I left high school suffering from the malady of boredom.

And opted for one thousand hours of hairdressing school in a city a two and more hour bus ride away. I was up in the dark every morning, and returned in the dark hours later. I learned how to finger-wave and do a roller set and braid. Decades of do-s.

My first day there, the woman next to me noticed I didn’t have a pen to fill in the introductory form, and she offered me hers. Forty-one years later, we are friends.

I had a nightmare that I left a women under an old-style hair-dryer overnight, and when I returned to school the next morning, all that was left on the set of pink, orange, purple salon seats… was a crisp piece of bacon.

You can shake yourself out of boredom. Pinch (see Monday’s post), and bacon, and go.

Until last April, I taught writing in an MFA program. Too many syllabi to write, too many assistants to manage. Too little writing. Too much fantasy fiction. I like to bore into reality tick-like.

A useful motivator: leave a bored child by themselves; they’ll create something.

Be a bored adult today. Feel it until you start to laugh. Don’t be afraid. Let it grow so big it pushes out and away the need to produce.

Laugh. Go sing in the street.

Two.

This cat will be unable to return to a state of boredom for some time.

Three.

Patti Smith makes me happy.

If, like me, you are busy with a family and two jobs, you might not think you have time to be bored. What about those minutes between things when you usually check your phone? You could do some being bored then.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to visit Alison’s newsletter/website Unschool for Writers.

Grow slowly
Jeff